IPCRG at EAACI 2024

Our colleagues Dermot Ryan, Jaime Correia de Sousa and Janwillem Kocks were delighted to be invited to represent IPCRG at the 2024 conference of our sister society, the European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (EAACI), presenting on the primary care perspective. EAACI is a very large European medical organisation: the conference attracts over 8000 delegates annually with a substantial number participating online. Always listening to the needs of primary care, they recently created a section for Primary Care and Allied Health.

Dermot Ryan started off the session by talking about the development of a recently published Desktop Helper: The jigsaw as a metaphor for asthma diagnosis with an explanation as to how it facilitates the intuitive interpretation and categorisation of pieces of information as they are gathered to make an overall picture of the diagnosis.

Jaime Correia de Sousa introduced Asthma Right Care as a social movement initiated by the IPCRG, identifying over-reliance on SABA as the problem it seeks to address, and explaining how the movement moved forward, mobilising networks and connections between networks, connecting people globally, involving different patients and health professions (GPs, other respiratory physicians, nurses, pharmacists, emergency care, paediatric and maternal care), and extending to several countries around the world. He then presented the programme's guiding strategic document, 'What does good quality asthma care look like?'.

Janwillem Kocks then shared experiences and possible ways to use large datasets to inform and change practice, proposing the AC/DC Prediction tool and CodeX (developed with IPCRG involvement) as ways identify with patients that have uncontrolled disease from their medical records.